AMELIA ISLAND CONCOURS D’ELEGANCE

The Amelia is a concours held on the fairways of a golf course beside the Atlantic, on the second weekend of March. Some two hundred and seventy-five cars in thirty-five classes.

It is the youngest of the great concours, and the only one that began as a hospice benefit.

The Condition

In 1996 the general manager of the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island wanted an event on his campus and went looking for somebody to run it. He found Bill Warner, a Jacksonville businessman who raced, collected, and had been photographing and writing for Road and Track since 1971.

Warner said he was not really a concours man. He agreed on one condition: that the show give money back. His father had died in hospice care and his wife’s parents had been in it too. The beneficiary was settled before the first car was chosen.

The first event was held on a misty Saturday in April 1996 on the tenth fairway. Warner telephoned friends, called in favours and pestered collectors into lending cars worth seven figures. He got a hundred and sixty-three of them, and two thousand people came.

Four million dollars has gone to hospice care and other local causes since.

The Driver

Each year the concours honours a racing driver and brings his own cars to the lawn. Stirling Moss was the first, in 1996. Richard Petty, Roger Penske, Dario Franchitti and Helio Castroneves have followed.

Warner’s reasoning is the interesting part. Racing drivers compete in different disciplines at different circuits. They know of one another and almost never meet. A sports car man and an oval man can spend forty years in the same sport without once sitting at the same table.

The Amelia puts them on one lawn. Which makes it, beneath the paintwork, an exercise in assembling company rather than cars.

What to Know

This is not Pebble Beach and it is not trying to be. Pebble judges originality and correctness to a standard that borders on the forensic. Amelia mixes concours cars with racing cars that carry their scars, and the honoured driver’s machines are shown as they were run.

The lawn is the tenth and eighteenth fairways of the golf club beside the hotel. Flat, walkable, and the ocean is on the other side of the dunes.

Thirty thousand people come and the island has a limited number of beds. Rooms go from Jacksonville up into Georgia.

There is a weekend around the Saturday: an opening party on the Thursday, seminars, and auctions besides.

The mistake is going for the cars alone. The drivers are the reason this concours exists, and a good number of them stand beside their own machines answering questions from whoever asks.

The Court

The Amelia is not the Court’s own. Entry, hospitality on the lawn and rooms on the island are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of the weekend: getting there, where to stay, and the table afterward.